


Small Things

by itchyfingers



Category: Benedict Cumberbatch - Fandom
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-02
Updated: 2013-05-02
Packaged: 2017-12-10 04:29:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,987
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/781789
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/itchyfingers/pseuds/itchyfingers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A first meeting told twice - once from her point of view, and once from his.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Small Things

**Author's Note:**

> Just a one-shot I wrote to help me work on developing distinctive character voices.

It was the curl. That stupid, irritating, enchanting, mesmerizing curl. When you are growing up, you think the course of your life will hinge on the big decisions. Where to go to university. What course of study to pursue. Whether or not you move across country to take that big job. What it really came down to was the curl.  

We had met at a party, friend of a friend, and while we were chatting, I kept being distracted by the way that curl fell across his forehead, and maybe it was effects of one too many martinis on my part, or an extra whiskey on his, but I finally gave in to the temptation and leaned in to brush it away and he thought I was leaning in to kiss him and our first kiss was an awkward bump of noses and off-centered lips and a surprised look on my face and an embarrassed one on his.

“I’m normally much better at that,” he had quipped and I had stuttered out an apology for touching his hair and he had smiled that smile that I would come to know and love so well. You know the one, where it gives him cheeks instead of just cheekbones and those faint lines at the corner of his eyes and oh, his eyes. Those blue eyes or are they green? I can never decide for sure. They change color with his shirt, with his mood, with the way I look at him. There was always that freckle in his right eye, but that was the only thing permanent about those ever-changing orbs of color. And then he shook that curl back down over his forehead and said, “I won’t try to kiss you this time if you want to do that again,” and the voice in the back of my head, the one that was normally shushed by all the quiet responsible voices that rule my life, chose that moment to wrench control of my mouth away from the martinets that insist on using the proper fork even when home by myself, and responded, “But what if I want you to kiss me again?”

He leaned in and asked, “Do you want me to kiss you again?” in a voice so deep I could feel it almost more than hear it and the voice in the back of my head sort of had a panic attack because ‘oh my god I just told this gorgeous guy that I want him to kiss me’ and all I could do was nod because I had no idea what would actually come out of my mouth if I tried to speak. He took me by the hand and tugged me somewhere more private and he backed me up against the wall, one hand by my head, the other one on my waist and he leaned in and I couldn’t even breathe in anticipation as his lips hovered over mine for one long moment. It was his eyes again that distracted me, so many different colors even in the dimness of the room we were in, but they were seeing me, not just looking, but seeing me in a way that was as intimate as a caress. I finally closed the infinitesimal distance between our mouths. And oh, his mouth.

It was the curl, and the smile, and his kaleidoscope eyes, and now his mouth. I’ve kissed a few boys in my day, but nothing compared to this. His lips were full and soft and unlike a lot of guys with large mouths who just sort of end up slobbering on you, his touch was precise, firm, intoxicating, and lush, all at once, in this heady mix of pheromones and mystery.

There really aren’t words to capture the magic of a first kiss. You have that breathless anticipation that sends your body into a little bit of oxygen debt which heightens all your senses, and then the feel of all those nerve endings being caressed, and you can feel their skin, and their breath, and the faintest hint of tongue as lips part to explore each other.

It was like…You know that kiss at the end of _North & South_, where John Thornton finally kisses Margaret Hale and even as a voyeur you can feel the love that he has for her? It was like that. Not that he loved me yet, because we had just met each other that evening, and three hours of discussing books and plays and movies and music and the worst travel experience (amoebic dysentery in Tibet was beat out by carjacking in South Africa) and irrational fears (bugs crawling up my nose and laying eggs in my sinuses and then eating their way out of my face) can’t get you all the way to love, but we had definitely travelled to deep like at this point, and the way I shivered when he trailed his hand down my bare arm and him swallowing nervously when I touched the vee of skin at the open collar of his shirt made us both realize that there was a connection beyond availability and alcohol at work here.

That was even before he touched my face. He has big hands. Everyone knows that, but knowing it and feeling it are different, because he cupped my face with his hand, and even with his thumb on my cheek and his lifeline on my jaw, his fingers were long enough to reach around to the back of my neck, and oh, he played me like Chopin on a piano. After a while I realized his thumb was slowly stroking up and down my neck, tracing my windpipe, exerting the softest pressure against my skin; just enough to make me aware of my own vulnerability. It added an extra frisson (yes, I went to university, can you tell?) of excitement, like someone running an ice cube down your back when you’ve been sunbathing.

I finally convinced myself to pull away from him before things got out of hand. Part of me, that part under the control of that voice in the back of my head desperately wanted things to get out of hand; technically, they wanted things to get into his hands, because, have I mentioned his hands? The sensible part of me could hear people in the other room and knew that as isolated from the world as I felt wrapped in his embrace, we really were on verge of being rudely interrupted. He ended up escorting me out to a cab, his arm around my waist. We exchanged numbers, and he promised to call me the next day, and with a single soft kiss he shut the cab door behind me.

He did call me the next day, but that’s a story for another time.

*

I know she blames it on my curls, but I blame it on her laugh. She has an amazing laugh, hearty and robust. I could hear it over all the chatter at the party. It literally turned my head to figure out where that sound was coming from. I saw her talking to my friend. She wasn’t the most gorgeous woman in the room but when she laughed her face lit up and I was hit by an overwhelming desire to be the one eliciting that sound.

It took a little work but I managed to finally get her to myself. Up close, she had a vivacity to her that was hypnotic. When she smiled it went all the way up to her eyes. There was no pretense. She was genuine and authentic to her core. When you spend as much time with actors and celebrities and people who are hiding and pretending for a living, to see someone uncalculatingly enjoying herself is a rarity.

We talked for hours, and she disagreed with me. Again, that’s a rarity these days. For some reason, people think that the way to get me to like them is to agree with everything I say. But why would I want someone who thinks just like me? I already think what I think. I want someone who has something to add to the conversation, not a mirror or a parrot. And she was delightfully disagreeable. It’s not that she hated _Catcher in the Rye,_ she just questioned whether or not the protagonist was really as universal as its advocates proclaimed. She said she’d never seen _Sherlock_ because she grew up with Brett and Rathbone and the novels and was scared that a modern adaption would lose the spark of originality at the core of the stories.

She was enchanting. We shared stories of boarding school and gap years and travel gone wrong. I told her about skydiving and she told me about her love for scuba diving. I racked my brain thinking of stories I could tell her that would make her laugh, because that sound was like a drug, and I was quickly becoming addicted. We had moved closer to each other as we talked, either consciously or not, and after several hours she leaned in towards me and I was thrilled to think that she was attracted to me as I was to her, though I must admit I was a bit surprised that she would make the initial move. I leaned in to kiss her and ended up mostly missing her mouth. I haven’t misread a woman that bad since I was in my teens.

It was hard to tell who was more embarrassed, though she showed it more than I did, I think, because she blushed all the way up to her roots and stammered out an apology for wanting to tuck my hair back. I did what any gentleman would do in that situation; I offered to let her play with my hair without trying to kiss her. And that’s when her complete and total lack of affectation showed to my advantage. She told me that she wanted me to kiss her. So I did.

Not right there in front of everyone, of course; not the way that I wanted to kiss her. That was the first time she let me see part of her that not many people get to see, a part of her that was more relaxed, a little less proper. The contrast was beautiful. Watching her shift from elegant and refined to playful and flirtatious was like getting to the second act in a play. It made her even more intriguing.

In that darkened hall way I pressed her up against a wall, shielding her with my body from anyone that might walk by and resting one hand on the curve of her waist. I leaned against the wall just looking at her for a long moment, our faces close enough together that I could read everything she was thinking in her eyes, even in the dusky light. She leaned in that final distance, and I felt a rush of adrenaline that I normally only get when the house lights fall.

Kissing her was amazing. I should leave it at that, because frankly it’s none of your business. But I will say two things. First, the sound she made when I kissed her is even more addictive than her laugh. And second, she may not have started out as the most gorgeous woman in the room, but by the time our lips parted, I only had eyes for her. If I say that I wanted to protect her, people might assume that I think she was weak. But I did want to protect her. I wanted to make her happy, to give her as many reasons to laugh as I could. I had fallen for her hard and fast, and I knew I wouldn’t make it twenty-four hours before I called her. And I didn’t.

But that’s a story for a different time.


End file.
